Hello people. I've been doing a lot of work on producing Debian ARM CDs that support Risc PCs as well as Netwinders and have now had some sucess so I thought I'd give an update.
I've got a working archive mirror for the potato/arm stuff (main so far, I'll add contrib and non-free at some point). And with some effort I've got Debian-cd to produce working discs. It doesn't seem to work exactly as advertised and some jiggery-pokery is required to get the local bootfloppies and locally-updated arm packages to go in the right places. I've mailed debian-cd about that but not had much useful response yet - it's not critical. There are several problems caused by the general crapness of the RISCOS CDFS prior to version 4 (which can be made to read rockridge and then generally works properly). The earlier releases won't read any CD that has a title with spaces in or is longer than about 10 chars so I have to change the Volume IDs accordingly. Fortunatley these are not depended on by the installer, but again debian-cd doesn't cater for this possibility (all the options _except_ -V <volid> are under ARCH or config control). Also all CDFS version recognise .txt.gz files as type 'text' and .ps.gz os 'postscript', which means that things like the debian FAQ need gunzipping otherwise they appear in a confusingly useless form on the RISCOS desktop. There are probably a few more issues like this, but I've now got some CDs that basically work so I'm just changing the manual to match up (and will probably change the Debian ARM readmes accordingly too). This should mean that we'll be able to send some out to mere mortals soon and hopefully convert some to the cause. BTW - this is a good moment to give due credit to the efforts of Peter for making bootfloppies work and Chris for fettling the autobuilder and doing some new debs - good job all round. There's still a selection of 'slightly broken' things, but overall this is a huge step forward for ARMLinux on RiscPCs. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel (00 44) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
